DAN MACKAY: Real 'Casualty' stars should earn at least a fair wage
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The Real MacKay by Dan MacKay
The actor Derek Thompson, who plays Charlie Fairhead in the long-running BBC drama Casualty, will be hanging up his scrubs and retiring at the end of the year.
After 37 years and 900 episodes which have charted both the professional and personal lives of the medics in Holby City’s A&E department, it will certainly be the end of an era.
Viewers will be sad to see Charlie go. He has been a central character renowned for his sound judgement and compassion. An altogether decent bloke, he will be greatly missed.
He’s had his own moments – not least being run over by an ambulance on his wedding day, suffering a near fatal heart attack and, very poignantly, his heart-breaking farewell to Duffy, his beloved dementia-suffering fellow nurse.
It’s said the Beeb are planning a gripping exit storyline which will be aired in the autumn.
But unlike real life, Charlie Fairhead is 75 years old and one doubts many nurses, these days, could work to that age and survive 37 years in our fraught and troubled NHS.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the guy a lot – but doubtless his reputed annual earnings of around £350,000 must have been a tidy financial inducement to stay on!
Are we losing the plot? It does seem like it when an actor can earn such eye-watering rewards compared to the real hospital ward angels – and, indeed, junior doctors – who struggle to get by earning just teens of pounds per hour.
Not that long ago, during the dark days of the pandemic, we all stood on our doorsteps and applauded their sterling efforts – but this Tory government is not prepared to pay them a fair wage for their life-saving efforts.
And we were mortified by the hypocrisy of then health secretary Matt Hancock, who was caught on CCTV, how shall we say, mixing with another household in a scandal that led to his resignation.
Don’t feel bad for him though. The boy did alright and disappeared into the jungle earning a reputed £320,000 appearing on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Then topped that up with a £48k payment for his Pandemic Diaries!
Local nurses – like their colleagues across the country – must feel galled when locum agency staff working alongside them can earn massive pay hikes. If you’re doing the shift for, say, £15 an hour and an agency worker is getting up to £60 an hour for the same job, how would you feel?
It does seem like we have the wrong values and priorities.
And now the parliamentary privileges committee – an independent government watchdog – has unanimously concluded Boris Johnson, our former prime minister and boss man, deliberately and repeatedly misled parliament during the Covid pandemic. In other words, he lied – and lied again.
Whilst the vast majority of people accepted curtailments to their personal liberties, including not being able to meet up with family and friends, some of whom were ill in hospital or confined in care homes, there were no such restrictions for Boris and his partying pals in Downing Street.
We thought that by staying at home we were protecting one another and saving the NHS. No wonder we lose trust in politicians. It seems we are the real casualties in this sorry saga.
